Site Mobile Navigation

ABROAD AT HOME; 'The Most Cruel'

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

It was a modest Congressional hearing, little noted, in comparison with the Iran-contra hearings. But suddenly, in a few minutes, it illuminated a most important question about the United States Government's proxy war on Nicaragua: what the war has done to us.

The subject before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee was the killing of Benjamin Linder, the 27-year-old American civil engineer murdered by the contras on April 28. His parents, David and Elizabeth, were the witnesses.

Benjamin Linder was a volunteer helping a small village in northern Nicaragua. On April 28 he was out looking at a nearby stream, planning to dam it and generate electricity for the village. The autopsy report said he was first injured in the legs, then killed with a shot to the head from less than two feet away. There were gunpowder burns on his face.

''They blew his brains out at point-blank range as he lay wounded. . . .'' his father told the committee.

A Republican member of the committee, Representative Connie Mack of Florida, rounded on Mr. and Mrs. Linder. He suggested that they had not allowed an appropriate time to grieve for their son before trying to do something about the policy that led to his death.

''I can't understand,'' Mr. Mack said, ''how you can use the grief I know you feel to politicize this situation. . . .

''I don't want to be tough on you, but I really feel that you have asked for it. I think that your being here today - it is less than three weeks since your son died. . . .''

In the background, on a National Public Radio tape of the episode, Mrs. Linder could be heard saying with an air of disbelief, ''Asked for it?'' Then she said: ''That is the most cruel thing you could have said.''

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

''I don't consider it to be cruel,'' Mr. Mack replied. ''I consider it to be to the point.''

Representative Mack in ordinary circumstances is very likely a person with human feelings. I suppose he would usually understand, and sympathize, if a grieving parent tried to do something to keep others from dying as her son did.

Suppose, for example, that the parent of someone killed by a drunk driver appeared at a legislative hearing to urge stricter controls on alcohol. Would Mr. Mack denounce her for ''politicizing'' the situation? Would he excoriate Mothers Against Drunk Driving and say they had asked for it?

No, ideology drives a politician to such a brutal extreme. Ideology and the need to justify support of a policy that has had such bloody consequences. Politicians do not like to admit that things have not turned out as they wished, and so they twist and turn, even to the point of denouncing a parent for complaining about the policy that killed her son.

Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, told the hearing that Benjamin Linder's death was ''a tragedy which need not have occurred'' but for Nicaragua's ''practice of permitting and even encouraging Americans . . . to travel in combat zones.'' In other words, the fault lay with the victims, not with the attackers.

Imagine what Elliott Abrams would say if a government of which he approved were beset by rebels with a cause, and the rebels killed an American civilian trying to bring electricity to a peasant village in that country. Of course he would denounce the attackers as terrorists. But in Nicaragua, he justifies terrorism.

That is the price we have paid for creating and directing the war on Nicaragua: the corruption of our own souls. Officials of the Reagan Administration, knowing that their policy could not be squared with America's professions to the world, have resorted to secrecy and lies. A lawless end has led to lawless means, to inhumanity, to cynicism.

Representative Mack's comments to Mr. and Mrs. Linder made me think back to an episode 33 years ago. In the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joseph McCarthy, under fire, made a sudden attack on someone who had nothing to do with the proceedings. The Army's lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, said:

''Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?'' That moment made people understand Joe McCarthy; it accelerated his destruction. Perhaps someone, soon, will have the courage to say something similar to the American supporters of terrorism in Nicaragua.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 15, 1987, on Page A00031 of the National edition with the headline: ABROAD AT HOME; 'The Most Cruel'. Today's Paper|Subscribe